number 34 • Winter 2018

Authors

Julian L. Simon

articles

BY INCREASING somewhat the flow of immigrants—from about 600,000 to about 750,000 admissions per year—the immigration legislation passed by Congress late in 1990 will improve the standard of living of native born Americans. The bill represents a sea change in public attitude toward immigration; it demonstrates that substantially increasing immigration is politically possible now. That’s all good news, and we should celebrate it.

IN THE 1980S a revolution occurred in scientific views about the effect of population growth on economic development: economists stopped asserting that population increases must exhaust natural resources and preclude economic growth. Revolution is usually the most newsworthy of events, but this revolution has been ignored by the popular press, which continues to hawk the pre-Revolutionary conventional wisdom. The lack of news of this revolution is itself newsworthy.

THE scare stories in the newspapers and on television about the loss of cropland to urbanization in the United States are statistically unsound, yet the misinformation contained in them has already had destructive effects on individuals and upon the economy. Bernard J. Frieden, in the Spring 1979 issue of The Public Interest, discussed the impact on people who want to build and buy new homes. But there are also ill effects on industrial development, on farm planning, and on the incentive to farm-all the outcomes of restrictions on economic mobility in the name of “saving prime farmland.”

MOST people who look at the prospects for the planet Earth in the next few decades find the outlook pretty sobering. They see mounting problems-persistent human poverty, rapid population growth, ever-increasing human demands, severe stresses on the earth’s resources and environment-and no easy answers. They believe the world has no time to lose in facing up to the problems and working for solutions.

Now the Global 2000 Study makes it official that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. As Time says, “The U.S. government has added its full voice to the chorus of environmental Cassandras... a presidential panel warns that time is fast running out for averting a global calamity.” President Carter requested the Global 2000 Study, it was chaired by the Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of State, and eleven (11) agencies “cooperated,” including the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, and Interior, the Agency for International Development, the CIA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, and three other agencies with names slightly less well-known. That’s pretty official.